Guattari, Transversality and the Experimental Semiotics of Untranslatability Author(s): Andrew Goffey
Source: Paragraph, Vol. 38, No. 2, Translation and the Untranslatable (July 2015), pp. 231- 244
Published by: Edinburgh University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44016375 Accessed: 30-01-2023 07:56 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms
Edinburgh University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Paragraph
Guattari, Transversality and the Experimental Semiotics of
Untranslatability
Andrew Goffey
Abstract:
Following the thread provided by his lifetime of engagement with psychosis, this article considers a number of aspects of the writings of Félix Guattari in relation to the problem of untranslatability. Contrasting Guattari s approach with the structuralist diagnostic conceptualization of psychosis in terms of foreclosure, it follows the early development of his concept of transversality and the critique of linguistics that it leads to. Turning then to a consideration of the specific privilege Guattari accords psychosis, it addresses his constructive experimenting with theory as a way to rethink enunciation in terms of a semiotic 'energetics' that permits an effective problematization of the theoretical and practical privileges of the 'normal' structures of language within analysis. Finally, Guattari's approach to the challenge psychosis poses to the limits of language is contrasted to Cassin s conception of logology in its relation to untranslatables.
Keywords: psychosis, Guattari, transversality, enunciation, semiosis, logology
Introduction
In post-war France, and, in particular, in the heady days of upheaval following the events of May 1968, forming part of what Gilles Deleuze would later refer to as the 'breaking down of institutions',1 the role of madness in political struggles against power acquired something of a self-evidence, and a self-evidence underpinned by both epistemic and aesthetic strictures. Sociologist Robert Castel was not exaggerating
Paragraph 38.2 (2015): 231-244 DOI: 1 0.3366/para.20 1 5 .0 1 60 © Edinburgh University Press
www. euppublishing. com/j ournal/para
when, distinguishing 'two readings' of Michel Foucault s History of Madness, he claimed that, in the post-'68 era, the text tapped into an 'anti-repressive sensibility', emphasizing the connections made between Foucault's work and the political critique of power.2 Yet the links between madness and politics did not have to wait until 1968 in order to be made, any more than critical explorations of limit experiences had to wait until Tel Quel discovered Artaud to find their articulation. Indeed, if, to borrow Foucault's enigmatic formulation, madness can be equated with the 'absence of oeuvre ' then the failure of posterity to consecrate the writings of French analyst, militant and philosopher Félix Guattari, who spent the entirety of his adult life working with patients with serious mental-health issues and whose writings offer an ongoing engagement with psychosis, provides a suggestive framing for the intellectual marginalization of Guattari's work, a set of conceptual resources that are as troubling as they are fruitful.
This article aims to develop a reading of Félix Guattari in terms of what it sees as his constructive approach to untranslatability. Focusing on his continued engagement with psychosis in his writings, and the connections between that engagement, the kind of experience that his writings seek to explore, and his critical analysis of the operations of language, I will argue that Guattari's writing offers a pragmatic framework not just for making the untranslatable (as that which is situated within the interstices of well-formed language/s) perceptible but of constructively exploring its lineaments for itself. Indeed, in the peculiar disruption of the surfaces of sense that are encountered in the delire of the schizophrenic (an untranslatable itself theorized by Gilles Deleuze through Lewis Carroll and Antonin Artaud in terms of the fragile, event-driven emergence of a distinction between words and things, language and corporeal depths), Guattari finds an investment of world that not only re-figures and de-figures the semantic organization of the time and space of the 'normal' operations of language, but also provides a way to open up 'universes of reference' that might otherwise remain walled off in a realm of irreducible strangeness.
A Cultural Diagnostic?
Within the psychoanalysis that informs Barbara Cassin's exceptional conceptualization of untranslatability - the untranslatable is that
which, like Lacan s unconscious in writing, doesn't stop not translating itself - psychosis marks out a structural position vis-à-vis language that precludes the 'normal' operations of the symbolic, indeed which while becoming manifest in language marks the destruction of the latter according to any notion of its ordering by a master signifier.
Discussing psychosis in his seminar in 1955-6, Lacan observes that the psychotic subject is in the same position as Freud in relation to the unconscious, an unconscious which Freud tackles 'as if he were translating a foreign language'.3 Yet the translation metaphor here for Lacan is unsatisfactory because it fails to address the specific quality of psychotic phenomena: to wit that 'what is refused in the symbolic order re-emerges in the real'. What emerges in the real in psychosis are hallucinatory phenomena, phenomena which the normal well- constituted operations of discourse 'repress'. In Lacanian terms, the normal commerce of language as symbolic order fails here because, while the unconscious is present in psychosis, it fails to 'function':
'What is at issue when I speak of Verwerfung ? At issue is the rejection of a primordial signifier into the outer . shadows' ( Psychoses , 150). The failure of the normal operations of language creates a problem of a different order for analysis and its operation of 'translation': no longer that of bringing to light repressed material, but the question of how to constitute some sort of ordering such that the normal operations of language (and with it the analytic use of the transference) can occur.
We have already noted the important place that considerations of madness had in French intellectual culture in the 1960s and
1970s, not least in the structuralist hands of researchers associated with the Cahiers pour l'analyse. For theorists such as J. A. Miller, for example, the foreclusive structure said to be proper to psychosis becomes a peculiarly general conceptual figure for understanding science: 'every science is structured like a psychosis: the foreclosed returns under the form of the impossible'. Although himself once an ardent Lacanian, Guattari's approach to psychosis is markedly different. Indeed, while it can be read - and has been read - as a sort of heroization of the schizophrenic, such judgements lose their discriminating capacity when weighed both against the place that psychosis has more broadly in structuralist thinking and against the clinical engagement of his work. Indeed, Guattari's understanding of psychosis attributes significant social and political aspects to what is otherwise theorized as a refusal of the symbolic order, but it also entails a more significant and less explicitly acknowledged consideration of languages and their limits.
Transversality and the Enunciation of the Institution
For Guattari, who worked for many years in the La Borde hospital and also continued to practise as an analyst, psychoanalytic appraisals of psychosis were of limited value, offering at best a diagnostic framework and little, if anything, for the more difficult and ongoing task of treatment. Indeed, as one of Guattari s colleagues has pointed out, 'few of the analysts in [Lacan's] School who do treat psychosis operate in asylums, and rely more on the teachings of Rosenfeld, Searles, Gisela Pankow or Françoise Dolto than on the foreclosure of the Name-of-the
Father . 5
For Guattari, the absence of sustained direct involvement with psychosis other than for diagnostic purposes is a problem, and it direcdy entails a rethinking of psychosis that places greater emphasis not just on the non-autonomy of language, but also on the trans- individual processes that are put into play in and by an unconscious that is somewhat refractory to 'ordinary' analysis. For Guattari, developing a critique both of key psychoanalytic techniques, as well as its conceptual tenets, not only entailed developing a political response to claims to professional expertise but also a radical opening up of analytic processes to other forms of practice. It also, significantly, informed his work with Gilles Deleuze and their endeavours not just to develop a politicized response to analysis, but to reconceptualize language and the processes of enunciation of which it is a part. The challenge of psychosis is, in this respect, one that concerns the institutional framework of enunciation, and Guattari sought to address it by means of the extraordinarily important concept of transversality.
The concept of transversality emerges in part out of Guattari's prolonged critique of the 'personological' understanding of language at work within psychoanalysis, and, specifically, within Lacanian versions of analysis. While not initially conceptualized in terms of enunciation, transversality - in Guattari's early writings institutional transference (later reframed as 'group transversality') - aims to capture the unconscious as an investment of the broader elements and processes within the specific social setting of the hospital, a pattern of investment that would come to light only with the greatest difficulty in the dyadic enunciative setting of the analyst's consulting room. Social relations (the hierarchical qualities of the division of labour, for example), rhythms of work, architectural forms, organizational settings, and so on, are understood to come into play here, forming a part of the unconscious investments of groups within an institution that can
and sometimes do come to light. More pointedly perhaps, from a therapeutic point of view, the idea of transversality points towards the propensity of the institution as such to offer the possibility of what Pankow calls 'transferential grafts', points at which patients whose recalcitrance to normal techniques of analysis, 'open up', beyond the 'obligatory, predetermined transference "territorialized" on a role'.6 Indeed, referring to Pankow and her practice of using modelling clay in analysis, Guattari says 'at La Borde, our modelling clay is the "matter" of the institution, which is generated through the entangling of workshops, meetings, everyday life in dining rooms, bedrooms, cultural life, sports, and games . . . '7
The concept of transversality is indissociable from Guattari's concern to rethink enunciation along social and political lines, via a developed critique not just of psychoanalysis (in Anti- Oedipus) but also of linguistics (in A Thousand Plateaus). The development of an understanding of enunciation that is collective is for Guattari necessitated in part by the practical difficulties of treating psychosis on the basis of the methodological individualism that is presumed in standard analytic techniques, but the concern is more far-reaching than that. The central relationship between subjectivity and language
in analysis is well known, and is of course encapsulated in its
characterization as the 'talking cure'. By contrast, Guattari (with Deleuze) argues that conceptions of language that infer features of the subject of enunciation (the one doing the uttering) directly from the grammatical features of the subject of the statement are mistaken.8 In the field of analysis, they argue, this can only lead to a misapprehension of the way that the unconscious works. What gives rise to a particular set of utterances in an analytic situation is not an 'individuated' unconscious articulating itself in relation to the universal (logico- mathematical) form of a language but a potentially far broader set of elements and processes - what Guattari will later call an 'assemblage' of enunciation.Once again, Guattari's position is in marked contrast to structuralist analysis, which in its approach to psychosis not only appears only to offer a diagnostic framing - a structure - but is also centrally reliant on the transference. For example, the Brazilian Lacanian Contardo Calligaris has argued that there is no difference between the diagnosis of psychosis and the normal work of the cure, the diagnosis taking place 'within' the structure, on the basis of, and within the transference itself: 'for an analyst, making a diagnosis and knowing more or less what happens in the cure in which the analyst is caught up, is the
same thing'.9 Discussing this claim in the context of his own work, Polack raises several obvious questions: what exactly is a 'transferential situation'?; where does it start and end?; and what is the normal labour of a cure? Working within a hospital, for Polack, entails accepting that a transferential situation need in no way be modelled on the 'normal' work of the cure. In this respect, the concept - and practice - of transversality offers a counter-practice to the tacitly normative 'transferential situation' of analysis, in that it brings into play broader, institutionally disseminated unconscious processes and investments.
With regard to psychosis, then, there is no gnoseological privilege to be accorded to the dyadic situation of the 'normal' work of analysis, and what constitutes an absolute limit to the normal operations of language that might make translation a pertinent metaphor must be readdressed. This is not to say that unconscious phenomena and the operations of language that one can observe in the normal setting of analysis are illusory - far from it. The point is that when reconsidered in light of transversality and the experience of the La Borde clinic, the unconscious that is decoded within traditional forms of analytic practice has no universality and is thus not a good model. As Guattari puts it:
the familialist reductions of the unconscious to which psychoanalysts are accustomed, are not 'errors'. They correspond to a certain type of collective assemblage of enunciation. They operate on the basis of the very particular micropolitics relative to unconscious formations that preside over a certain capitalist organisation of society.10
The point, then, for Guattari, is not one of simply denying the existence of transferential effects, despite the obvious virulence of his critique of analysis and of the 'underhand' operations that are founded on the transference. Indeed, the normalizing power he attributes to psychoanalysis would perhaps be impossible without them. The concept of transversality points not just towards a more general mobility of affect, a sense of mobility that is perhaps already inherent in the broader, non-technical sense that transference has in Freud.11 Unsurprisingly perhaps, from its early formulation in terms of the institution, Guattari 's conception of transversality acquires a considerably broader and frankly speculative quality, finding in Schizoanalytic Cartographies a critical role in the semiotic energetics developed there, facilitating a thinking of the inherent mobility of affect more generally in terms of the idea that it constitutes the 'deterritorialised matter of enunciation'12 per se, a paradoxically non- linguistic and hypercomplex motor for all language use.
Psychotic Praxis
Working with psychosis, as Polack has pointed out, means that clinically speaking, in the first instance, one is dealing with the domain of originary repression, a 'psychic space that symbolic structuration has not yet gridded and striated, which one approaches obliquely, via sensations, sensibility, affects, forms and intensities'.13 It offers a starting point for an exploration of phenomena and experiences that are difficult to detect within the 'normal' operations of the unconscious, where secondary repression has been successful and individuals are more or less successfully positioned by the symbolic order (and a patient effectively 'knows' something about what is repressed). As Guattari puts it, 'psychosis not only haunts neurosis and perversion but also all the forms of normality' in a stasis that is only apprehended
everywhere else by 'avoidance, displacement, misrecognition,
distortion, overdetermination, ritualization'. Psychosis 'haunts' all forms of normality for Guattari because of its connection with the failure of 'secondary' repression, the fragility of the constitution of the 'surface' of sense that his friend Deleuze explored, which failure becomes manifest in, for example, the non-sense of delire. If for Guattari the normal operations of language are to be apprehended as a characteristic of particular formations of power, and if, as the experiences of La Borde suggest in relation to treating psychosis, the geography of the unconscious constituted through originary repression can be better disclosed through its oblique address by institutional 'modelling', then psychosis is (as Guattari argues in Chaosmosis) an ever-present possibility. More controversially, Guattari argues that we should seek to understand normality and the normal functioning of language from the point of view of psychosis, and not the other way around: '"Normality" in the light of delire, technical logic in the light of Freudian primary processes - a pas de deux towards chaos in the attempt to delineate a subjectivity far from dominant equilibria, to capture its virtual lines of singularity, emergence, and renewal . . . '15It is important to note here, though, that Guattari is not simply proposing a more clinically informed version of the epistemological privilege that the Cahiers pour l'analyse accorded to psychosis. Indeed, having used the configuration of the institution to question the enunciative structure that the normal operations of the transference presuppose, Guattari is arguing instead for an approach to psychosis that is capable of addressing the strange affective texture of its
experience in the complex relational ensemble formed by the
institution, which experience, he argues, is missed in 'normal' analysis and is calling on a different approach to enunciation, one he later calls 'ethico-aesthetic', to do so. Of course, invoking some sort of privilege for the experience of psychosis, particularly in relation to the aesthetic, may be strongly reminiscent of a rather romantic lionization of madness that, as we have seen, was common currency in the tumultuous France of the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is important, however, to remember the clinical as much as the political context, and Guattari is in some respects much closer to arguments that stress the intuitive, empathetic understanding of psychosis - a phenomenological, rather than a structuralist, stance reminiscent of the very significant current of existential analytic work that tackled psychosis.16
How, then, is one to understand what Guattari is aiming at
here? Psychosis calls for a 'schizoanalytic reduction' that is able to apprehend semiotic discordances within the affective matter of enunciation, and that is able to consider enunciation to be as inherently composite as the affective energy to which it gives form is complex.Relying on structure would not work here - Guattari thinks
Lacan threw the baby out with the bathwater with his criticismsof the concept of libidinal energy17 - any more than would
essaying phenomenological descriptions of psychotic experience.Guattari 's conceptualization of affect as the 'deterritorialized matter of enunciation' (as part of a 'semiotic energetics' that attempts to rethink ideas of the fluidity of affect) points instead to the complexity of qualitatively highly differentiated 'semiotizations' of 'drive' energy and the originarily transitive and pre-personal nature of affect in its relation to enunciation. Affect, in this view, is complex and 'atmospheric' before being simple and individuated: the datum of what he calls 'chaosmosis' and the locus for a potential praxis, for the possibility of working on the 'non-sense' of enunciation, rather than a position in relation to a structure: 'an instance of the engendering of complex processuality in the nascent state, the locus of the proliferation of mutant becomings', which calls for a kind of analysis whose 'basic work consists in detecting enkysted singularities - what turns around on itself, what insists in the void, what obstinately refuses the dominant [self-] evidence, what puts itself in a position contrary to the sense of manifest interests (...) and to explore their pragmatic virtualities'.18
Experimental Semiotics
One might consider Guattari's theoretical writings in terms of a broader practical problem he is seeking to address, namely the question
of how one can extricate oneself from the 'homogeneous' register of meaning production, and how one can make perceptible the 'semiotic discordances' he discerns in the psychopathological conditions that his theoretical activity is devoted to. At the same time, he is working on these conditions as creative openings out of normalized forms of expression. For him, this means conceptualizing other regimes of signs than those at work in 'normal' language. The key point in Guattari's theorization of transversality, and its relation to institutions that treat psychosis, is that it contests the idea that autonomous linguistic structures offer the best starting point for a comprehensive understanding of what is at play in enunciation.
One might therefore understand Guattari's tireless reworking of semiotic theory, and more particularly of elements of the work of the Danish glossematician Hjelmslev, as addressing the possibility not so much of an apodictic 'representation of but a risky 'intervening in' semiotic processes. Indeed, in La Revolution moléculaire Guattari quite explicitly argues for the value of Hjelmslev 's categories (of content and expression, of matter, substance and form) as a way of relativizing the place of the signifier in the institution, or of setting it out and at the same time of ensuring that signifying semiotics not 'crush' the other semiotics in play.19 A short passage from Anti-Oedipus makes strikingly clear what Guattari (with Deleuze) believes one can extract from the way in which Hjelmslev's categories relativize the linguistic operations of sense production. His theory
implies the concerted destruction of the signifier, and constitutes a decoded theory of language about which one can also say - an ambiguous tribute - that it is the only linguistics adapted to the nature of both the capitalist and the schizophrenic flows: until now, the only modern - and not archaic - theory of language.20 In such a linguistics, they further argue, in equally picturesque terms - reading Hjelmslev in conjunction with Jean-François Lyotard's Discours, figure - that
it is not the figures [Hjelmslev's 'figures of expression'] that depend on the signifier and its effects, but the signifying chain that depends on the figurai effects - this chain itself being composed of a-signifying signs - crushing the signifiers as well as the signifieds, treating words as things, fabricating new unities, creative from nonfigurative figures configurations of images that form and then disintegrate.
(Anti- Oedipus, 244)
Guattari is here looking for a way to explore on their own terms the kinds of semiotic discordances that one regularly finds in the speech of schizophrenics, rather than in relation to 'normal' language
use, and central to this search is the emphasis placed on what
Guattari calls 'a-signifying signs', and the work that they accomplish.What Guattari is interested in showing is, as he puts it, that 'non- linguistic semiotic metabolisms work these substances [of content and expression] "before" the constitution of a machine for "making significations'".21 'A-signifying signs' are what language takes hold of, reducing them in the process to the 'status of a linguistic component' ( Lignes de fuite , 163) as part of a system of coded correspondences.
What is most important here is the use of such signs to argue for the anterior existence of a non-linguistic, 'molecular' matter of enunciation, wherein the absoluteness of the distinction between expression and content (language and body, language and materiality more generally) breaks down, and points towards a kind of constant point of emergence for creativity, what his later work will refer to as the 'contingencing point', wherein a semiotic component opens up to new existential possibilities. Guattari argues that 'the whole question is one of seeking to determine what gives a creative function to a semiotic component and what takes it away. Languages, as such, have no privilege for semiotic creativity; they even function, most often, as encodings of normalization' ( Lignes de fuite , 163). This is not a simple romanticization of 'crazy talk', or of denying the difficulties of patients caught up in psychotic processes: semiotic creativity must be understood in relation to forms of practice that are not encumbered by an unacknowledged prior set of assumptions about the relation between language and other forms of semiotization.
What Guattari calls schizoanalysis, then, is a working on what he describes as the 'dissidence' of primary processes, which dissidence he sees in terms of a resistance to the ways in which dominant forms of language codify expression at the level of secondary repression. His 'a-signifying signs' and the processes they put into play - what he will conceptualize with Deleuze as 'desiring machines' - constitute a matter that is to be worked with and calls for analysis to follow 'as closely as possible the points of singularity, of non-sense, the semiotic asperities which, phenomenologically, appear the most irreducible'.22
While Guattari's repeated return to the categories elaborated by Hjelmslev - in La Revolution moléculaire , L'Inconscient machinique , the recently discovered manuscript Lignes de fuite and Les Cartographies schizoanalytiques - is always accompanied by criticisms of linguistics and semiology, there is more to his undertaking than a repeated critique of a certain kind of linguistics. Indeed, with each return, his view of enunciation changes somewhat and acquires increasing
nuance. Coming to focus finally on the labile relations between the form, matter and substance of both expression and content, in terms of a highly speculative semiotic energetics (but one that is not without links to the 'genealogy' and 'geology' of the sign proposed in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus respectively), Guattari proposes a 'modularized' approach to enunciation, in which Hjelmslev's categories acquire the broadest speculative extension and enunciation comes to form a kind of polyphonic orchestration of semiotic components. Affect here, as the deterritorialized matter of enunciation, can then be understood as the 'precarious result of a composition of heterogeneous modules of semiotisation'.23
In relation to psychosis, the issue of untranslatability is transformed because Guattari endeavours to grasp the process of semiotic genesis as an always contingent, constandy reprised affair. Far from having as its telos a positioning within a symbolic order, schizoanalysis essays an exploratory approach to the process of composing enunciation, one which challenges universalizing abstractions that fail to understand the manifestation of meaning in always contingent 'existential territories' and 'universes of reference'.
Conclusion
While there is not space here for a lengthy discussion of the intractably baroque style of Guattari's theoretical work, a few final comments about the process of enunciation are called for. In a chapter of Schizoanalytic Cartographies entitled 'Refrains and Existential Affects' Guattari compares enunciation to conducting an orchestra. It is, he says,
like the conductor who sometimes accepts his loss of control of the members of the orchestra: at certain moments, it is the pleasure of articulation, or rhythm, if not an inflated style, which sets out to play a solo and impose itself on others.
(...) Tempo, accents, phrasing, the balancing of parts, harmonies, rhythms and timbres: everything conspires in the reinvention of the work and its propulsion towards new orbits of deterritorialised sensibility. (SC, 210)
The final characterization of the approach to enunciation that Guattari conceptualizes in terms of 'ethico-aesthetics' refers to a kind of creativity that he associates with art. While this, once again, brings us back to the idea that learning from the example of psychosis is suspiciously close to a certain kind of romanticism, in the context of the present discussion it perhaps makes more sense to address
some connections with Barbara Cassin s conceptualization of logology.
This is not an arbitrary move, of course: the logological perception of language is a crucial point of reference for addressing issues of untranslatability. Indeed, in her recent essay Jacques le Sophiste , Cassin reiterates the importance of Lacan s logological perception of the equivocations of la langue to her understanding of untranslatability Appropriating Lacan for an approach to untranslatability that explores the equivocations that the history of every language allows to persist within itself, working these equivocations and homonyms 'text to text as symptoms of worlds' (SC, 207) offers a way of exploring the 'manner in which the real, which is to say, that there is no sexual relation, is sedimented' (SC, 207) in a language. There are numerous points on which a more detailed reading of the parallels between Cassin's logological account of language and Guattari's multiple
semiotics could be established here. One issue would concern the
pragmatics of language and the limits of analytic philosophy's account of the performative. Guattari is as obsessed with rethinking pragmatics as he is with reworking Hjelmslev 's semiotics. Indeed, he sees the two as indissociable, which is perhaps another way of saying that he would refuse the connection between enunciation and signifier considered by Cassin in Sophistical Practice.24
One way of bringing out some of the connections, at least in relation to the underlying thread of the argument here, would be to consider the ways in which Guattari's incessant reprising and reworking of Hjelmslev's categories offers another route out of the Aristotelian 'decision of sense' which Lacanian logology, and, more specifically, Cassin's reading of impossible jouissance as 'joui-sens', equally addresses.
Indeed, read more broadly in relation to the 'transcendental exclusion' of sophistics by philosophy, Guattari's two-headed writing with Deleuze, their vindication of becoming animal, vegetable and the like, indeed their ironic approval of Freud's comment that he doesn't like schizophrenics because they confuse words and things, and have an undesirable resemblance to philosophers, becomes a good deal clearer in this regard (Anti- Oedipus, 23). As Cassin notes, Plato, first of all characterizes the sophist as the ironic imitator, and Aristotle considers them dikranie - two-headed, like a talking plant.25 Pragmatically speaking, inscribing Guattari within this horizon is a move that must be considered carefully because one risks missing the earnestness of the challenge to the centrality of language that the concept of transversality opens up, as well as the experimental ethical horizon that the treatment of psychosis sets up. If untranslatable Lacanian equivocations form
symptoms of worlds, the semiotic discordances of psychosis, with their molecular play of a-signifying signs point instead to a different kind of a map, one in which languages are always in the process of becoming something else, in which the untranslatable is the starting point for an experiment or adventure. The signal interest of Guattari s abiding concern for and singular experience with psychosis is to have provided some of the means to explore these limits.
NOTES
1 Gilles Deleuze, 'Control and Becoming' in Negotiations: Interviews 1972-1990 , translated by Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 174.
2 Quoted in David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (New York: Vintage, 1994), 119.
3 Jacques Lacan, The Psychoses. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book 3:
1955-56 , translated by Russell Grigg (London: Roudedge, 1993), 12.
Hereafter abbreviated as Psychoses , with page reference immediately following quotation.
4 Jacques- Alain Miller, 'Action de la structure', Cahiers pour V analyse 9 (1968), 93-103 (103). Translations from the French are mine, unless otherwise indicated.
5 Jean-Claude Polack, 'Analysis, between Schizo and Psycho', translated by Andrew Goffey, in The Guattari Effect , edited by Eric Alliez and Andrew Goffey (London: Continuum, 2011), 57-67 (60).
6 Félix Guattari, Psychanalyse et transversalité (Paris: Maspero, 1974), 79.
7 Félix Guattari, De Leros à La Borde (Paris: Editions Lignes, 2012), 66.
8 See, for example, their criticisms of Benveniste in relation to pragmatics in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus , translated by Brian Massumi (London: Athlone, 1988), 78.
9 Quoted in Jean-Claude Polack, Epreuves de la folie: Travail psychanalytique et processus psychotiques (Ramonville-Saint-Agne: Editions Eres, 2006), 206.
10 Félix Guattari, Les Années d'hiver (Paris: Editions Prairie Ordinaire, 2009),
148.
1 1 See Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis , translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Karnac, 1988) 455-61.
12 Félix Guattari, Schizoanalytic Cartographies , translated by Andrew Goffey (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 213.
13 Polack, 'Analysis, between Schizo and Psycho', 64.
14 Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm , translated by Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (Sydney: The Power Institute, 1995), 82.
15 Guattari, Chaosmosis , 77.
16 In this regard, it is worth noting in passing the importance of Heidegger in the work of anti-psychiatry, as well as an ongoing 'debate' in Guattari 's work with the likes of Von Weizsäcker, Rumke, Binswangen Teilenbach and Tatossian. See Guattari, Schizoanalytic Cartographies , 109-10, 276.
17 Guattari, Schizoanalytic Cartographies , 50.
18 Guattari, Schizoanalytic Cartographies , 214.
19 Félix Guattari, La Révolution moléculaire (Paris: Editions Les Prairies Ordinaires, 2012), 449.
20 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen Lane (London: Athlone, 1984), 243. Subsequently abbreviated to Anti- Oedipus, with page reference immediately following quotation.
21 Félix Guattari, Lignes de fuite. Pour un autre monde de possibles (Paris: Editions de l'Aube, 2011), 162. Subsequently abbreviated to Lignes de fuite , with page reference immediately following quotation.
22 Félix Guattari, L'Inconscient machinique (Paris: Editions Recherches, 1979),
207.
23 Guattari, Schizoanalytic Cartographies , 206. Subsequendy abbreviated to SC, with page reference immediately following quotation.
24 Barbara Cassin, Sophistical Practice: Towards a Consistent Relativism (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2014).
25 See Barbara Cassin, L'Effet sophistique (Paris: Gallimard, 1995).
